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Chapter 15: Never Ask, “Who Am I?”

Osho,In his book, Codex Hammer, Leonardo Da Vinci has written:“It is impossible that anything of itself alone can be cause of its creation, and those things which are of themselves are eternal.”Would you like to speak on this?

The question is one of those which has been contemplated for centuries and yet no answer exists.

You have put it in the words of a philosophical treatise by Leonardo Da Vinci, known as Codex Hammer. His meaning may not have been apparent to you; it is something which every simple human being asks once in a while.

I will read Da Vinci’s statement, and would like to analyze it to its simplest form. Philosophers don’t like simplicity. They make complex problems out of the very obvious.

He is saying: “It is impossible that anything of itself alone can be cause of its creation, and those things which are of themselves are eternal.”

Perhaps out of fear of a very cruel Christianity, which did not allow any freedom of thought, he has put a simple question in such a way that ordinarily you will not understand what he is talking about. In its simplest form, he is saying, “God cannot be the creator.”

Christianity and other religions believe in God as a creator because nothing can be without a cause, nothing can come out of nothing. There must be something out of which you can derive something else: a cause is needed for every effect. The world is the effect and God is the cause; he is the creator and we are the created.

Ordinarily, nobody objects to it because ordinarily nobody bothers about who created the world and why the world was created. It is out of your way - there are a thousand and one problems to be solved, one does not want to be loaded by another. So people simply accept it.

But the philosophical mind cannot accept it so easily. If the world needs a creator, then the creator also will need a creator; otherwise from where can he come? That leads one into a very absurd logic: then one God creates the world, another God creates the God, and so on you go on.

But somewhere you will have to stop. Somewhere - X, Y, Z - you will have to stop: that Z created all other Gods. But the problem remains the same: where does Z come from? And if Z can be eternal, without a cause, then why unnecessarily harass and make a fuss about the world? Existence itself can be eternal, there is no need for any creator. If finally you have to accept that something is eternal without being created by anyone - has been always and will remain always - God is not needed.

Then this existence itself is enough unto itself. It is eternal, there is no need for any creator to take unnecessary trouble.